The fouling and cleaning of surfaces in the food sector

Cleaning-in-place (CIP) protocols are often automated, requiring that the temperature and chemical composition of the cleaning solution be tailored to the specific foulant. With growing pressure to reduce both the water footprint and environmental impact of a process, CIP procedures must be optimized to minimize water and chemical use, an exercise which will help to reduce costs and cleaning outages. Microfiltration and Ultrafiltration are filtration technologies which can separate micron-sized bacteria or even large macromolecules from process streams using a selectively permeable membrane, often without any required heating or energy- intensive mechanical action. Biofilms are associations of microorganisms in an aquatic environment, bound together by an extracellular polymer matrix, and attached as a layer to a substrate such as a pipe or wall. Biofilms are readily deformable soft deposits, which make the use of probes for measurement unsuitable, but using FDG researchers have been able to observe their removal from a surface by fluid shear and estimate their initial thickness.